Call for Papers

Values in Games

We hereby invite submissions to the 12th International Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games, to be held in Copenhagen on August 13-14.

The theme of this year’s conference is “value in games”. The topic will connect central themes in the study of games, including questions about the importance of games in a human life, the ethical value of games, and the values communicated through games. For this conference, we invite papers that explore these and other aspects of value in games.

We welcome submissions on (but not limited to) the following questions:

Can games contribute to a meaningful life?

Is there a special value to games, distinct from other social practices?

What is the value of difficulty, achievement, excellence, and skill in games

What is the relationship of the artistic value of games to their other values?

How do games transform the values that normally attach to activities outside the gaming context?

Are games an integral part of ideal society?

Can games contribute to an ethical life, and in what ways?

How do games encode systems of values, especially in their mechanics and game-play? In particular, how might they encode biases and other problematic attitudes?

How can the values in games be studied?

What value might games have for thinking about issues of race, gender, and sexual and romantic orientation?

How might we justify the inclusion or exclusion of transgressive content in games (violence, pornography, racism)?

How do players relate to, resist, shape, or appropriate a game’s values?

In addition to papers that are directed at the main theme we invite a smaller number of papers in an “open” category.

Accepted papers will have a clear focus on philosophy and philosophical issues in relation to computer games. We strongly encourage references to specific examples from computer games, as well as reference to diversity of games and game types. We are especially interested in papers that aim to continue discussions from earlier conferences in this series.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

The abstracts should have a maximum 1000 words (maximum 700 words for the main text and 300 for the bibliography).The deadline for submissions is May 21st. Please submit your abstract through review.gamephilosophy.org. All submitted abstracts will be subject to double blind peer review. Notification of accepted submissions will be sent out by June 1st. Participation requires that a paper draft is submitted by August 1st and will be made available on the conference website.

We also issue a call for workshops or panels to be held on August 15th. Please submit a short proposal to the program committee chair by May 21st if you are interested in organizing an event.

Virtual reality and spatial audio technologies bring about a new paradigm in the fields of architecture and music. While defying classification, works developed in these media extend our spatial and auditory sensibilities beyond what is perceivable in the physical world. Can we regard them however as architecture and music, or are they foreign to their origins?

Architect Constantinos Miltiadis and composer and sound artist Gerriet K. Sharma will present their investigations and exhibit works on virtual navigable environments and sculptural spatial audio. The event intends to initiate a discussion on the nature of such explorations, in parallel to the nature and future of music and architecture in the expanded field.

We are very happy to announce that Thi Nguyen from Utah Valley University has accepted the the role of program committee leader for the next PCG conference. He will be the first US program committee leader for the PCG conference series. Thi is already a member of the steering group for the game philosophy network.

The next conference is due to be held in Copenhagen at ITU in August. It is planned to be a part of a unique collaboration scheme which involves participants in other areas in the study of games.

The program committee will be constituted shortly and it will start to work on the next call for papers. More info about the conference and the larger collaboration scheme will soon follow.

This essay explores the features in virtue of
which games are valuable or worthwhile to play. The difficulty view of games holds that the goodness of games lies in their difficulty: by making activities more complex or making them require greater effort, they structure easier activities into more difficult, therefore more worthwhile, activities. I argue that a further source of the value of games is that they provide players with an experience of freedom, which they provide both as paradigmatically unnecessary activities and by offering opportunities for relatively unconstrained choice inside the ‘lusory’ world that players inhabit.

An important book on the aesthetics of computer games will soon be out, edited by Jon Robson and Grant Tavinor. From the description:

“This collection of essays is devoted to the philosophical examination of the aesthetics of videogames. Videogames represent one of the most significant developments in the modern popular arts, and it is a topic that is attracting much attention among philosophers of art and aestheticians. As a burgeoning medium of artistic expression, videogames raise entirely new aesthetic concerns, particularly concerning their ontology, interactivity, and aesthetic value. The essays in this volume address a number of pressing theoretical issues related to these areas, including but not limited to: the nature of performance and identity in videogames; their status as an interactive form of art; the ethical problems raised by violence in videogames; and the representation of women in videogames and the gaming community. The Aesthetics of Videogames is an important contribution to analytic aesthetics that deals with an important and growing art form.”

The paper argues that, under certain very specific conditions, games can transform competition into cooperation. Other accounts have tried to explain that transformation by focusing exclusively on player attitudes – their playfulness, or their consent. I argued instead for a distributed account of transformation: successful transformation depends on not only on players having the right motivational state, but also on aspects of game design, player fit, and extra-game community.

The aim of the workshop is to survey different options for answering the questions “What is a game?” and “What is a computer game?” and to get a feel for future directions that reflections on these questions may take. While keeping an eye on conventional notions such as voluntary goals, play and make-believe, the workshop will explore unconventional notions like artifact roles, status functions and new roles for play. The workshop will also discuss foundational issues for the project of defining games, such as definition types, essences, family resemblances or nominalism. The workshop is intended as a preparatory meeting, so please contact the organizers if you would like to participate in future events.

Program

10.00 Introduction

Sebastian Möring and John R. Sageng

11.00 On Defining

Anita Leirfall

11.30 The Wittgensteinian Thesis on Defining and Game Definitions

Oliver Laas

12.00 The Game as the Partner in Play: A Posthuman Approach to the Definition of the Video Game Object

In a few days, we will send notification letters to all of the authors. To make this time more bearable, we would like to share some news with you. We are happy to announce the fourth of our keynote speakers for the PoCP 2017 – Grzegorz J. Nalepa.

Grzegorz J. Nalepa is an engineer with degrees in computer science – artificial intelligence, and philosophy. He has been working in the area of intelligent systems and knowledge engineering for over 15 years.
He formulated the eXtended Tabular Trees rule representation method, as well as the Semantic Knowledge Engineering approach.
He authored a book “Modeling with Rules using Semantic Knowledge Engineering” (Springer 2017).
He co-edited a book “Synergies Between Knowledge Engineering and Software Engineering” (Springer 2017). He has co-authored over 150 research papers in international journals and conferences.
He coordinates GEIST – Group for Engineering of Intelligent Systems and Technologies (http://geist.re) cooperating with AGH University and Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. For almost 10 years he has been co-chairing the Knowledge and Software Engineering Workshop (KESE) at KI, the German AI conference, Spanish CAEPIA, as well ECAI. He is the President of the Polish Artificial Intelligence Society (PSSI), member of EurAI. He is also a member of IEEE, Italian Artificial Intelligence Society (AI*IA), KES, Polish Cognitive Science Society (PTK).
His recent interests include context-aware systems and affective computing.

The main ambition of “Perspectives of the Avatar” is to sketch the existential aesthetics that explore the situatedness of the individual towards a single player digital game with avatar. The book focuses on games falling within the category of independent or art games, and builds upon an assumption drawn from existentialism; where the individual facing the world is the central philosophical concern. In this theoretical horizon, a situation can become meaningful only from the point of view of the particular being.

Stefano writes “Something Something Soup Something is my latest attempt at ‘playable philosophy’. The game, if we agree to call it such, can be freely played on (or downloaded from) the official website: soup.gua-le-ni.com

I and the rest of the developers prefer to think of it as an interactive thought experiment: a piece of technology that discloses situations and presents notions in ways that are interactive and negotiable (and maybe even playful).

Something Something Soup Something it is designed to reveal, through its gameplay, that even a familiar, ordinary concept like ‘soup’ is vague, shifting, and impossible to define exhaustively. It is also designed to stimulate reflection on the possibility to analytically define what a game is: does the presence of several ‘ludological ingredients’ warrant its definition as a video game? What if only a part of it could be formally recognized as a video game? Is it even wise or productive to strive for a complete theoretical understanding of concepts like ‘soup’ or ‘game’?”

Game duration: about 6 minutes.

Something Something Soup Something was developed in collaboration with: